At AKOPIN we are always seeking new solutions to pressing industrial challenges. In our increasingly environmentally conscious society, the issue of single-use plastic has quite rightly gone under the microscope. As rubber engineering experts, we are only too aware of the impact of rubber products going into landfill. The environmental impact of our industry’s output has driven us to develop our Environment sustainable – and unique rubber recycling process, which enables us to break down and re-vulcanise nitrile rubber into recyclable compounds for re-moulding.

Rubber is difficult to recycle. Unlike plastic, you cannot simply heat and re-use rubber. Whereas thermoplastic materials can be heated, deformed and reprocessed into new or different products, the vulcanisation process permanently crosslinks the polymer bonds of a thermoset rubber. That process is hard to undo.

Alongside our Industrial partners & Chemical Suppliers, AKOPIN has successfully developed a scalable, proprietary rubber recycling solution. For the first time, this innovative process enables us to break down some of those aforementioned Crosslink Polymer molecular bonds to produce a reusable material.

This sustainable technology creates a recycling process that allows us to de-vulcanise end-of-life rubber products and re-vulcanise them into fresh ones. We simply combine the de-vulcanised rubber with a raw, virgin rubber compound to form new bonds and produce a newly moulded product. This is how we make all of our sustainable rubber products, which are kinder to the environment and just as uncompromising on quality as all our other rubber products.

At AKOPIN we are re-shaping the rubber recycling process, and you can be a part of this exciting revolution by choosing our Recycled Nitrile compound for your rubber products.

All of our products manufactured from Recycled Rubber exhibit reliable, repeatable physical properties, as well as a high-quality finish. Currently available in Nitrile, we can guarantee that up to 40-50% of the rubber in every product we mould from Recycled NBR has used recycled rubber from our game-changing process.

Here’s a simple step-by-step guide to how the Rubber Recycle process works in practice:

• Step 1: We grind down the selected polymer into a consistent crumb, which is still vulcanised at this stage.
• Step 2: It is carefully blended with advanced chemical catalyst that facilitate the disconnecting of the crosslinks.
• Step 3: A degree of mastication, temperature and pressure is imparted to disconnect the crosslinks and reduce the rubber crumb into a fine, friable and fully reactive material.
• Step 4: It is then mixed with virgin compounds of the same polymer for moulding into new products.

Following this four-step Recycling process, the original thermoset rubber can be incorporated into a new rubber compound formulation to be vulcanised and crosslinked into a functional product. Sustainable rubber recycling in the India has arrived and AKOPIN is redefining our relationship with rubber for the better.